Murder is a very serious crime, and aiding and abetting murder (or mass murder) is a serious criminal offense. Or so we thought.
Unfortunately, for many Americans, aiding and abetting murder is perfectly fine and beyond the reach of the law. Or, more accurately, the law has been intentionally kept at beyond arm's reach for such felons--and strangely, kept so by the felons themselves!
The US Congress has intentionally aided and abetted thousands of murders and other killings by refusing, once again, to limit the rights of citizens (it should be called citizens' wrongs) to bear arms of the most nasty sorts.
Now our noble congressmen always argue that they are just protecting the noble right of citizens to secretly own weapons, so they can do things like hunt polecats out on the range or fend off the Marines when they storm your neighborhood in some sort of coup. They claim--the congressmen, not the Marines--that they don't kill anybody. And the NRA is as pure as ivory soap.
But we live in the age of science, not out on the range. The arguments are a pile of range cattle droppings, because one can't claim innocence any longer. Everyone knows very well that thousands will be shredded at the hands of trigger-pullers that the Honorable(?) congressmen are directly enabling. Their refusal to act, or rather their intentional enabling acts, should be viewed by the law as no different from other sorts of aiding and abetting, punishable by the full force of the law.
(We must here admit to a bit of curiosity as to what a polecat slain with a burst of a hundred rounds of hollow-tips looks like. That curiosity is probably too morbid to admit to openly, but in any case all we could find on the web was this 'Before' shot of a polecat begging a National Rapine Association (NRA) member for mercy. The request was denied, of course, but the 'After' shot was rated X and can't be shown on a family blog.)
Gunslingers are brave, one would think. But the brave act is the right act, not the one that gives lower priority to children's flesh than to being re-elected to the job (because it provides nice group meals and complete health care and retirement benefits that even most NRA members don't qualify for). These gutless wonders of bravery, to whom we mistakenly give security passes to go into the Capital, have been properly taken to task by Gabrielle Giffords, but her moving words should lead us to move. They're gutless because they want campaign money, even if they know that a huge majority of the voters want to see fewer machine guns in schools and homes. But you can't really expect looney's to try to restrain other looneys. So, it's time to clean the Capital of what sullies it, to our national shame; too bad there's not an election for a couple of years (the gutless wonders hope you'll forget their craven acts by then, and maybe that cynicism is correct, though we hope not).
If you want to say something to these wonderful enablers, who drive the guntoters' getaways, you won't find them at the scenes of the crimes they abet. No. But you can find them, on Sunday, in church, thinking they're showing what good people they are.
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ReplyDeleteSometimes I am reminded incredibly forcefully how lucky I feel to be your child!!!
David Brooks today rather blithely says in the Times OpEd page that tanking the bill won't change any votes in elections, and wouldn't solve the murder problem. He must mean that congressmen don't care to seek votes by following the public will, as clearly revealed by polls, since they can get campaign funding anyway, and win without attempting to sway the unswayable.
ReplyDeleteOf course, there would still be murders, even butchering of children, if the bill were to pass. It wasn't even that much of a bill!
That someone will here and there always run amok is pretty obvious, and in a society that puts the mentally unstable on the streets rather than in some form of care, is a contributor. Gun laws won't stop all of them. That there are perps of the usual criminal sort (other than congressmen) is also clear.
So, really, let's say the bill would only prevent an occasional school shoot-em-up, not all of them, or maybe not even most of them. Somehow, to Brooks and other acolytes, that makes it logical to argue, in effect, that it's not worth trying to stop the ones we might stop.
Hell, it's only the odd bunch of teachers and kids here and there that would be spared. Most likely not your kids. What's the big deal??
Right on. Well said. "We" (to whatever degree an entire nation can be called a "we") react with vehement revulsion and shut down a city in response to an "other," a foreigner, with sh*tty homemade bombs yet fight just as vehemently to keep the means for slaying many dozens of children and wrong-place-wrong-time adults in the hands of our own citizens.
ReplyDeleteBoth public shootings and the Boston bombings are repulsive, horrifying, unnecessary and senseless. So why are we as a nation so willing to go to great lengths to annihilate the one, the statistically less dangerous but somehow psychologically more threatening, and equally great lengths to protect the tools of the other?
You make good points about how people think and behave. A bombing is a specific horror, as is a school shooting. In those cases we do whatever we can to catch the offenders.
DeleteWe set up passive security checks at airports, crowded events, and so on. But why that doesn't lead us also to do preventive checks for weapons more generally?
Or to ban the tools of mass shootings, more specifically.
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